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WORD FILE - REFLECTIVE DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

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WORD FILE - REFLECTIVE DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

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The Mass cultural delusion that the suns apparent position relative to arbitrarilty defined constellations at the time of your birth somehow affects your personality

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The Suns Position somehow defines your personality based on your birth

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The Suns Position somehow defines your personality based on your birth

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This is a group created that shares many people around the world who also hate Pseudoscience. They post examples of interesting different awarenesses on a daily basis.

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"I F***ing Hate  Pseudoscience" Facebook Community Group

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"I F***ing Hate  Pseudoscience" Facebook Community Group

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ARTICLE

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I fucking hate pseudoscience. 213,742 likes · 832 talking about this. A skeptically themed mix of comedy, education, annoyances and outrage. Manifesto:...

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Pseudoscience is just a hypothesis, This article talks about certain mythodologies that we all have seen weather that is basic instinct, lie detectors, or full moons.

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Using Pseudoscience to Shine Light on Good Science

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Using Pseudoscience to Shine Light on Good Science

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ARTICLE

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Science is the domain of methodical inquiry, hypothesis testing, and careful theory building - it deals with evidence that is subject to observation, investigation, and replication. Without question, understanding the scientific method is critical to any sort of scientific education.

But if psychology professors really want their students to think like scientists, they have to teach them about decidedly nonscientific ways of thinking, argued Scott O. Lilienfeld in the APS-David Myers Distinguished Lecture on the Science and Craft of Teaching Psychology at the 2014 APS Annual Convention in San Francisco.

To say that Lilienfeld, APS James McKeen Cattell Fellow and professor of psychology at Emory University, knows a thing or two about teaching may be a bit of an understatement.

He has taught or been involved in teaching Introduction to Psychology courses at four different universities over the course of his approximately 25-year academic career. He's mentored undergraduate and graduate students, contributed to online continuing education programs, and coauthored several psychology books aimed at both academic and public audiences.

In addition, Lilienfeld has spent his career as a champion of rigorous research in clinical psychological science, having authored over 300 peer-reviewed articles and chapters on topics like psychopathy and personality disorders, accurate assessment and diagnosis in clinical settings, and effective treatment for mental disorders.

So why would someone so dedicated to advancing the science of psychology devote precious instructional time to teaching his students about junk science or pseudoscience?

Because, as Lilienfeld and his recent coauthor Rodney Schmaltz of MacEwan University in Edmonton, Canada, have argued, it's the only way that students will learn to distinguish good science from bad.
Object Permanence
"[Students] don't typically come into chemistry classes with massive misconceptions about what quarks are," Lilienfeld observed. "However, they do come into their psychological classrooms with massive misconceptions about the nature of love, dreams, and memories."

And these misconceptions are likely to spread and strengthen as we continue to turn to the Internet, which is largely unconstrained by concerns of accuracy or validation, as a primary source of information.

In fact, misconceptions are rife among psychology students, Lilienfeld said. In polls, for example, 65% of psychology students report believing that strange behaviors are more common when there's a full moon, 77% believe that people with schizophrenia have multiple personalities, and 44% believe that people behave like robots under hypnosis.

Each of these supposed causal associations has been resoundingly debunked by scientific inquiry, and yet the associations seem to have remarkable staying power.

"The assumption is that if we expose our students to what there's good evidence for - the well-established findings of psychological science - those misconceptions should melt away, disappear, dissolve," said Lilienfeld.

But research indicates that not only do many students leave their science courses with these misconceptions intact, they also leave without a solid foundation in scientific thinking.

Bringing pseudoscientific findings out from their shadowy recesses, and explaining why they're wrong, seems to be essential in reversing this trend.
It's Only Human Nature
According to Lilienfeld, the most important point that both students and teachers need to understand is the fact that even the most scientific thinkers among us are prone to pseudoscientific beliefs.

Students need to understand that we're prone to cognitive biases like naïve realism, which leads us to the conclusion that "seeing is believing," even though we only need to experience one visual illusion to know that perception and reality are not always the same thing.

Thus, students must be taught that we're disposed to see patterns, associating completely unrelated events with great ease. And, once we've identified a link - whether it's between vaccines and autism, sugar and ADHD, or rainy weather and joint pain - it's difficult to "unsee."

"The example that I always give because it affects me, so I'm prone to illusory correlation too, is running late to work and red traffic lights," said Lilienfeld. "When I'm running late to work, running late to a class, it sure seems to me that there are a hell of a lot more red traffic lights than there are at other times. Is it possible that the Department of Transportation has engaged in a diabolical plot to keep me running late? It's possible. [But] more likely than not, I'm noticing it more often at those times."

Students should learn that an incredibly powerful confirmation bias drives us to seek out information that is consistent with what we already believe, making it difficult to even encounter information that would disprove the conclusions we've already drawn.

And they need to comprehend that we're biased when it comes to recognizing the prevalence of these cognitive biases. Our "bias blind spot" makes it easy for us to detect these biases in others while remaining oblivious to the fact that we are also susceptible to them.
Protecting Us From Ourselves
Lilienfeld acknowledged teaching students about pseudoscience is one way to get them more involved and engaged in class, because they love talking about weird pseudoscientific phenomena such as ghosts, ESP, and UFOs.

But teaching them about pseudoscience also serves a more fundamental purpose by providing the stark contrast necessary for illuminating what scientific thinking truly is.

"We think of science as figuring stuff out, but science is more than figuring stuff out. It's more than just a body of knowledge," said Lilienfeld. "It's an approach to knowledge - bending over backwards to prove ourselves wrong, as the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman reminded us."

Of course, delving into the world of spurious phenomena doesn't come without a few hazards. For example, instructors don't want students to confuse open-minded skepticism with closed-minded cynicism. And they certainly don't want students to come away with the impression that science, in general, isn't reliable or trustworthy.

"We want students to understand that psychological science has, in many ways, been our best friend against pseudoscience; it has helped us to debunk these claims," Lilienfeld said. "Psychological science is what keeps our field healthy."

Pseudoscientific findings may be seductive, but Lilienfeld strongly believes that the causal stories offered by empirical science are even more compelling.

"As scientists, we've got better stories than the pseudoscientists," he said. "Why? Because our stories have the value of being correct, or at least have a better approximation to the truth. And that, I think, is the best parting message."

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Using Pseudoscience to Shine Light on Good Science

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Science is the domain of methodical inquiry, hypothesis testing, and careful theory building - it deals with evidence that is subject to observation, investigation, and replication. Without question, understanding the scientific method is critical to any sort of scientific education.

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Magic team practice pressure phrenology pseudoscience by squeezing parts of Howie Mandel's skull to make him lose the ability to read.

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America's Got Talent 2014 - "Demonstration of Pseudoscience"

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America's Got Talent 2014 - "Demonstration of Pseudoscience"

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VIDEO

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David & Leeman: Howie Mandel Can't Read When Magicians Squeeze His Skull - America's Got Talent 2014

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David & Leeman's magic team practice pressure phrenology pseudoscience by squeezing parts of Howie Mandel's skull to make him lose the ability to read! See the charismatic duo do their thing!

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Understand the difference between science and old methodologies from ancient times and how it still affects peoples thinking of today.

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Advertisment you might see everywhere you go beware of their claims

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Brian Dunnings - 5 Ways to tell science from Pseudoscience

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Brian Dunnings - 5 Ways to tell science from Pseudoscience

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VIDEO

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inFact: 5 Ways to Tell Science from Pseudoscience

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Here are 5 quick ways for you to tell good science from bad science. http://infactvideo.com Tired of nonsense in advertising? Here are 5 red flags you can look for that characterize bad information masquerading as a sales pitch: #5: The Miracle that's Too Good to be True Life is full of complicated problems, so there's always someone selling the miraculously easy solutions we all wish were true.

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Quick article read for what people deal with on a daily basis of what to watch out for

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Funny example of what you feel may be suitable based based off of "expert" opinion.

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This educational video give you easy to

understand information and examples.

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Loose weight now!! From this small simple pill!!

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Loose weight now!! From this small simple pill!!

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ADVERTISMENT

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VIDEO

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“Natural Medicine” Is Often Code for “Pseudoscience”

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“Natural Medicine” Is Often Code for “Pseudoscience”

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"Natural" is such a pretty word. It conjures up all sorts of nice mental pictures: waterfalls, butterflies, the slow return to spring after a long winter. When someone makes reference to nature and all things natural, odds are that's the kind of thing you're meant to think of in response. Presumably they're not expecting you to think of amoebic dysentery.

The trouble is that there are horrible things that are also entirely natural. Nobody really celebrates freezing to death in January or being pursued by predators, as natural as they may be. But for skeptics of evidence-based medicine, "natural" is a handy go-to word to make the target audience share their skepticism. Modern medicine isn't easily found in nature, the thinking goes, and so it is something of which to be wary at best.

This kind of rationale clearly undergirds the practice of a recently-profiled pediatrician who doesn't vaccinate her patients routinely. "I think we're just messing with nature," says Dr. Stacia Kenet Lansman of vaccinating children on the standard schedule (or, in the case of several preventable illnesses, at all). We are then meant to imagine immunizations plowing, bulldozer-like, through the primroses of a child's pristine immune system. (Never mind that the immune system is quite capable of handling all those vaccines and more.) Nature is not to be messed with!

What she doesn't want you picturing is measles spreading like wildfire through her unvaccinated patients. Which, of course, would be a perfectly natural outcome.

There are plenty of wonderful ways of maintaining health that come from nature. I am on essentially the same page as Michael Pollan when it comes to what constitutes a healthy diet-basically foods as close to their natural forms as possible. I tell patients that good sleep habits and regular exercise will probably do more under most circumstances to make them feel good than anything I can prescribe. There is at least some evidence that letting your kids play in dirt is probably better for them than raising them in an ultra-clean germ-free zone.

"Natural" and "healthy" often go hand-in-hand. But they're not synonymous, and the former doesn't always lead to the latter.

It is the natural course of type-1 diabetes for the patient to waste slowly to death, but nobody questions the benefits of exogenous insulin. Albuterol inhalers come mass-produced from a factory, and yet asthmatics still prefer them to wheezing uncontrollably. Presumably if any of Dr. Kenet Lansman's patients get stricken by the rotavirus she declines to protect them against, they will avail themselves of the wholly unnatural IV fluids that will keep them from dying of dehydration after days of non-stop vomiting and diarrhea.

If you flush your waste away to be processed in a treatment facility, you are messing with nature. (Those of you taking a break from digging your own latrines to read this essay, please carry on.) If you are plugged into the electrical grid in order to power your home, nature has been messed with to a great extent by the time you flip the switches. If you'd rather pop a couple of Advil than hunker down with a strip of willow bark the next time you get a headache, then you understand that sometimes an unnatural route to feeling better is still the right one.

Do these manipulations of nature sometimes cause ill effects that must be managed or mitigated? Of course. But good sanitation, electrical power, and telecommunications are manifest benefits to humanity that we all recognize as worth the deviation from a purely primeval life.

So, too, with modern medicine. Some interventions, like chemotherapy for leukemia, have serious side effects that must be closely monitored but are still obviously worth it in pursuit of curing the patient. Others, like vaccines, carry such an overwhelming benefit at minimal risk that any decision to refuse them requires a justification other than logic. Hence, vague words with unclear meanings like "natural."

Doctors are charged with keeping our patients healthy. Often there is a natural route to that, but sometimes there is a human-made one instead. That doesn't make it wrong, and leaving children vulnerable to preventable diseases makes no more sense than swearing off flush toilets.

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Warning: "Natural Medicine" Is Often Code for "Pseudoscience"

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"Natural" is such a pretty word. It conjures up all sorts of nice mental pictures: waterfalls, butterflies, the slow return to spring after a long winter. When someone makes reference to nature and all things natural, odds are that's the kind of thing you're meant to think of in response.